Key Takeaways:
- The village levy grew 35% in fifteen years. Inflation grew 48%. In inflation adjusted dollars taxes have gone down about 9% since 2010.
- The school district — the largest line on your bill — barely moved at all. Only a 4% increase over fifteen years. Adjusted for inflation, that’s a decline of roughly 30%.
- That era appears to be over. Every one of the twelve sample houses saw its bill rise between 8.5% and 8.9% in December 2025, the first across-the-board real increase in the past 15 years.
We all pay a lot in property taxes, right? That’s a fairly uncontroversial stance. But how much more are we paying than we used to? What does the recent history look like? Those are questions I’ve recently been pondering, so I went looking for those answers.
Before we get too far into this, recall that our property tax bills include payments to five different entities: the village, the school district, Milwaukee Area Technical College, Milwaukee County and the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District.
Using Milwaukee County’s Public Portal, Whitefish Bay’s annual budget documents, and the school district’s levy summaries, I went back 15 years with three questions: how have the village and school district levies compared with inflation, and how have our total tax bills compared with inflation.
First, the village levy
In 2010, the Village of Whitefish Bay collected $10.2 million from property taxpayers. On the bill mailed in December 2025, it collected $13.8 million. That’s an increase of 35% over fifteen years.
Thirty-five percent sounds like a lot right up until you set it next to inflation, which ran 48.1% over the same stretch. Measured in constant dollars — what the money will actually buy — the village is collecting about 9% less from us than it did in 2010.
Here it is at five-year intervals:
| Year | Village levy | Change since 2010 | Inflation since 2010 |
| 2010 | $10,252,464 | — | — |
| 2015 | $10,762,595 | +5.0% | +7.9% |
| 2020 | $11,820,885 | +15.3% | +18.9% |
| 2025 | $13,841,152 | +35.0% | +48.1% |
The village stayed under the inflation line at every checkpoint, but it hasn’t been a straight line. Between 2015 and 2020 the village very nearly kept pace — three-tenths of a point behind inflation over those years. Nearly all the ground was lost in two places: the early 2010s, and the stretch after 2021, when the levy grew faster in nominal terms than at any other point here (17.1% over five years) and still fell six points behind inflation.
Second, the school district’s levy
The school district is the largest line on your tax bill, and if the village’s levy looks restrained, the district’s barely moved at all. In 2010 the Whitefish Bay School District levied $21.5 million. For 2025-26 it levied $22.4 million — an increase of 4% in nominal dollars against that same 48.1% inflation.
| Tax year | School levy | Change since 2010 | Inflation since 2010 |
| 2010 | $21,543,990 | — | — |
| 2015 | $22,013,663 | +2.2% | +7.9% |
| 2020 | $21,348,805 | −0.9% | +18.9% |
| 2025 | $22,404,435 | +4.0% | +48.1% |
Adjusted for inflation, the district is collecting about 30% less than it did fifteen years ago — more than three times the village’s real decline. Put another way, the village’s levy grew more than eight times as fast as the district’s over the same fifteen years.
The recent movement is where the story has shifted. The district’s levy fell to $20.2 million in 2024-25, then jumped 11% in a single year to its current level.
That’s a fairly exceptional stretch of fiscal efficiency, though it’s fair to say that it could be foreshadowing a need for community investment to keep up with aging infrastructure and rising costs.
Finally, the household tax bills
So two of the largest pieces of your bill both grew well under inflation, and the biggest one hardly grew at all. What did that add up to on an actual bill?
The data isn’t sitting in a tidy spreadsheet anywhere I could get my hands on. So I took a more reasonable route: I pulled one house from each of the village’s twelve voting wards and tracked its total tax bill every year back to 2010.
| Ward | Address | 2010 | 2025 | Change | At inflation | Real change |
| 1 | 6100 Block Bay Ridge | $10,772 | $12,004 | +11.4% | $15,951 | −24.7% |
| 2 | 6100 Block Berkeley | $16,986 | $18,814 | +10.8% | $25,152 | −25.2% |
| 3 | 5500 Block Bay Ridge | $5,764 | $5,983 | +3.8% | $8,535 | −29.9% |
| 4 | 600 Block Beaumont | $8,057 | $9,653 | +19.8% | $11,931 | −19.1% |
| 5 | 5300 Block Shoreland | $6,590 | $6,408 | −2.8% | $9,759 | −34.3% |
| 6 | 1100 Block Lexington | $12,827 | $15,038 | +17.2% | $18,993 | −20.8% |
| 7 | 5100 Block Kent | $4,969 | $6,078 | +22.3% | $7,358 | −17.4% |
| 8 | 4900 Block Wildwood | $6,508 | $7,713 | +18.5% | $9,636 | −20.0% |
| 9 | 4800 Block Hollywood | $4,828 | $4,878 | +1.0% | $7,149 | −31.8% |
| 10 | 4800 Block Larkin | $9,959 | $10,356 | +4.0% | $14,747 | −29.8% |
| 11 | 4700 Block Sheffield | $5,576 | $6,233 | +11.8% | $8,257 | −24.5% |
| 12 | 4700 Block Wilshire | $20,530 | $18,598 | −9.4% | $30,401 | −38.8% |
Twelve houses is a small sample, so don’t read too much into any single row. The trend is the point, and the trend is consistent: not one of them kept pace with inflation, and every one is paying less in real terms than in 2010 — by 17% at the low end and 39% at the high end in this sample.
Two of them, on Shoreland and on Wilshire, pay fewer nominal dollars today than they did fifteen years ago! Not inflation-adjusted dollars. Actual dollars.
Combined, these twelve bills grew 7.4% over fifteen years. You can check your own house’s taxation history at this link. Remember that everyone’s situation is a bit different. If there’s been an addition to your house or if the house has been torn down, you are going to see a very different number.
The decade of declining nominal change
One striking pattern in the data isn’t the endpoints. It’s actually the middle.
From the December 2016 bill through the December 2024 bill, the combined tax on these twelve houses fell in nominal terms — from $118,777 to $111,383, a drop of about 6%. Over that same window the CPI rose 30.9%. Adjusted for inflation, these twelve households saw their tax burden shrink by over a quarter in eight years.
At some point those costs would likely require some sort of catch-up, unless taxpayers decide to start demanding cuts in services (or we decide to ramp up density). And it appears that shift may have already started. Of the twelve houses above, every single 2025 tax bill rose between 8.5% and 8.9%.
What to make of it
Whitefish Bay has a reputation as an expensive place to own a home, and in absolute numbers that’s true — individual residential property bills run from a few thousand dollars to $104,000, though about two-thirds of the village paid less than $10,000 this year. But the fifteen-year trajectory is not the one that reputation necessarily implies.
Assuming inflation continues at a decent pace as it currently is, it’s fair to say the next 15 years is unlikely to look like the past 15 — and it’s reasonable to say that trend has already changed as of the most recent tax bill. Between the potential school referendum, the cost of replacing aging water infrastructure, and the county’s courthouse project, just to name a few, there are likely to be more increases ahead. That may not help the sting of those increases, but a look back at how little our taxes have risen may help put into perspective how inevitable they may end up being.
Leave a Reply